Giant Anisotropic Magnetoresistance due to Purely Orbital Rearrangement in the Quadrupolar Heavy Fermion Superconductor PrV_{2}Al_{20}.

Abstract

We report the discovery of giant and anisotropic magnetoresistance due to the orbital rearrangement in a non magnetic correlated metal. In particular, we measured the magnetoresistance under fields up to 31.4T in the cubic Pr-based heavy fermion superconductor PrV_{2}Al_{20} with a non magnetic Γ_{3} doublet ground state, exhibiting antiferroquadrupole ordering below 0.7K. For the [100] direction, we find that the high-field phase appears between 12 and 25T, accompanied by a large jump at 12T in the magnetoresistance (ΔMR∼100%) and in the anisotropic magnetoresistivity ratio by ∼20%. These observations indicate that the strong hybridization between the conduction electrons and anisotropic quadrupole moments leads to the Fermi surface reconstruction upon crossing the field-induced antiferroquadrupole (orbital) rearrangement.